Posted 1:32pm CT Jan 18, 2008 in Minneapolis

Researched and written by Gloriscope staff

2007: The German Christian Democratic politician Dr. Hans-Gert Pöttering (Poettering), a Roman Catholic, was elected President of the European Parliament. – His official biography says that his political conviction “is shaped by a Christian conception of man, as taught in Catholic social teachings” and that he supported “the consideration of references to God and acknowledgement of the Judaeo-Christian heritage in the constitution [of the European Union].”

1970: German theologian Hans Küng rejected the Roman Catholic dogma of the infallibility of the Pope and the Curia. – He did so in his book Infallible? An Inquiry, published on the 100th anniversary of the proclamation of the infallibility of the Pope

1815: Birth of Constantin von Tischendorf, a German Bible scholar who found Codex Sinaiticus, the ancient manuscript of the entire New Testament. The first achievement of Tischendorf’s career was his decipherment of Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus, a 5th-century Greek manuscript of the New Testament. In 1844, he found 44 pages of the then-oldest copy of the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) in the St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt. he called the manuscript Codex Frederico-Augustanus. In 1845-1852, he published the editions of various ancient Bible manuscripts. In 1859, during another trip to the St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai, he received the remainder of the ancient Bible manuscript, and all the pages from Sinai were published in 1862 in four volumes under the name Codex Sinaiticus. This Greek-language manuscript from the 4th century contains the complete New Testament and parts of the Old Testament. Codex Sinaiticus, owned by the British Library in London since 1933 and published in print, is one of the world’s two most valuable Bible manuscripts – the other one is Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican Library in Rome. (The photo here shows a reproduction of the Codex Sinaiticus, verses 2:3-8 of the Book of Esther of the Old Testament.) Tischendorf’s greatest work is his book Novum Testamentum Graece (1849), a critical edition of the New Testament, in which he established the principles of textual criticism of ancient biblical manuscripts. Tischendorf died in 1874.

1801: Birth of James Evans, the English Methodist pastor, linguist and missionary in the Hudson Bay area of Canada  –  He invented a script for the Ojibwe language of Native Americans.

1536: The Spanish conquistador Francis Pizarro founded the city of Lima, the new capital of Peru.

1529: Martin Luther published in Wittenberg his Small Catechism, the first Protestant catechism in the world. – Small Catechism, providing basic texts for everyday godly living, had great impact on the spread of Protestantism in Germany. The January 1529 edition contained: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Holy Baptism, the Sacrament of the Altar, and selected Daily Prayers.

KNOW MORE: Read other daily posts “This day in history” (in their chronological order)

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TO GOD BE ALL THE GLORY!

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